In April 2022, the Central Bank of Sri Lanka announced the suspension of repayment of Sri Lankan external debt service, thus defaulting for the first time in its history and highlighting an economic crisis whose warning signs had been accumulating for several years. Following this episode, the country entered a major economic crisis (depreciation of the rupee, increased inflation, decline in official reserves) leading to shortages of basic goods: fuel, medicines, gas, chemical inputs, foodstuffs. The economic crisis had a strong impact on the agricultural sector and the Ceylon tea industry was not spared. Representing 11% of the national export revenues in 2023($1.3 billion), tea is an essential component of the Sri Lankan economy. Despite the arrangements put in place by the public authorities, the tea industry has been seriously affected, highlighting structural difficulties linked to a dual dependency: on imported mineral fertilization for production, and on the configuration of international markets with regard to exports.
In this context, the project to create a geographical indication (GI) for Ceylon tea, led by the Sri Lanka Tea Board, the apex body of the Sri Lanka Tea industry, was announced as a tool providing collective response to the crisis. The exercise of defining the specific quality of Ceylon tea linked to its origin posed a practical challenge: the re-embeddedness of tea production process in its territory - in its environmental, social and economic dimensions.
Using the IAD/SES framework, this communication will provide a longitudinal analysis of the Ceylon Tea PGI building process. The analysis will explore the different dimension of the collective action and arena of discussions. It will highlight the difficulties in re-articulating the socio-ecosystems dynamics with the productive one to propose a collective response to the extent of the structural difficulties of the Ceylon tea sector.
The analytical work presented is based on 2 years of participant observation and semi-directed interviews covering all the segments of the tea industry from tea gardens to exporters (> 60 ). It also uses the results of thematic working group sessions involving all the unions from the various segments of the industry (> 120 participants), the results of the PGI consultation workshops (> 550 participants). ), the incremental versions of the GI specifications . All of these materials made it possible to trace the timeline of the project up to the submission of the specifications to the European Commission in September 2024.
